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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on June 2, 2006
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl008
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© 2006 The Authors This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article

Neural Representation of Navigational Relevance Is Rapidly Induced and Long Lasting

Gabriele Janzen 1 *, Barbara Wagensveld 2, and Miranda van Turennout 3

1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands; F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands
2 F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands
3 F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Gabriele Janzen, E-mail: gabriele.janzen{at}mpi.nl


  Abstract

Successful navigation is facilitated by the presence of landmarks. Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) evidence indicated that the human parahippocampal gyrus automatically distinguishes between landmarks placed at navigationally relevant (decision points) and irrelevant locations (nondecision points). This storage of navigational relevance can provide a neural mechanism underlying successful navigation. However, an efficient wayfinding mechanism requires that important spatial information is learned quickly and maintained over time. The present study investigates whether the representation of navigational relevance is modulated by time and practice. Participants learned 2 film sequences through virtual mazes containing objects at decision and at nondecision points. One maze was shown one time, and the other maze was shown 3 times. Twenty-four hours after study, event-related fMRI data were acquired during recognition of the objects. The results showed that activity in the parahippocampal gyrus was increased for objects previously placed at decision points as compared with objects placed at nondecision points. The decision point effect was not modulated by the number of exposures to the mazes and independent of explicit memory functions. These findings suggest a persistent representation of navigationally relevant information, which is stable after only one exposure to an environment. These rapidly induced and long-lasting changes in object representation provide a basis for successful wayfinding.

Keywords: fMRI; human navigation; learning and memory; memory formation; parahippocampal gyrus.
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